Abstract

Photography is an imaging technology which has been put to very diverse use, as Patrick Maynard has reminded us. Many scholars in both the humanities and the social sciences are enamoured of some of those uses, and have focussed on particular sorts of photographs at some length. Their overwhelming preference is for photographs of people and places, that is, photographs in a figurative, pictorial tradition of imaging. Such photographs have been approached as part of that uniquely human process of making meaning, of recording and interpreting the world by creating images of it. And because photographs always show something that has passed – a pose no longer held, a place no longer looking like that, a person no longer alive – they have persistently been associated not only with what has been, but with death itself.